When Rebecca Gentile joined the Crawford Central School District in Pennsylvania as Director of Technology, she was faced with a daunting challenge. The district wanted to deliver the kind of user-friendly digital technology that the students and teachers deserved. But like many school districts in the U.S., the budget was tight. Extremely tight.
Rebecca needed to get creative and shop around for a solution that not only met the needs of the students and teachers, but also fit the budgetary requirements of the district.
When she took the position, the district was running on antiquated systems and needed an overhaul. The student-to-device ratio was 10:1. From a learning-experience standpoint, Rebecca felt like not much had changed since she was a student.
A Vision to Capitalize on Technology
The district built a vision for how students and teachers could capitalize on the technology. The vision included two main components:
- The district wanted the students to be able to expand learning beyond the four walls of the classroom. Because learning doesn’t just happen between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., they wanted to have a technology solution that could be used inside and outside of school.
- The district wanted to change the dynamic of learning in the classroom. They were ready to see teachers play the role of facilitators, with the students doing the driving.
To make this vision come to life, Rebecca said that they needed to make sure their “highway was solid.” Infrastructure should be transparent to the user so that students, teachers, and faculty could do more of the fun things they wanted to do. Once the vision was in place, Rebecca created a technology roadmap and went to work.
The district knew they wanted to provide a student-to-device ratio of 1:1 for secondary students, and Rebecca was tasked with turning this dream into a reality. Her team needed to figure out a way to deliver and deploy applications without continuing to invest in costly hardware and specialized computer labs. The kids were going to have their own devices, so investing in on-premises hardware no longer made sense. Cloud infrastructure made sense, and that’s where Citrix comes into the story.
With Rebecca’s search for a technology solution, she knew that whatever solution the district employed, it needed to meet a few critical criteria:
- The technology needed to be easy for teachers and students to use.
- The technology needed to work cohesively with the teachers’ lesson plans.
- Most importantly, the technology needed to be affordable and fit within the school district’s budget.
Rebecca and her team also knew that they wanted to migrate as much of their infrastructure as possible to the cloud. This was crucial, because every bit of onsite infrastructure requires someone to manage it. But if the infrastructure mainly lives in the cloud, the team could save a lot of time and resources — an ever-important endeavor when you’re talking about a small school district with a tight budget.
As any great Director of Technology would, Rebecca shopped around to find the solution that would help the district’s 1:1 device-to-student ratio dream come to life. VMware wasn’t able to deliver the thing that she really wanted — infrastructure off premises. Microsoft introduced Rebecca and her team to Citrix. As she looked more closely into the options Citrix was able to offer, she realized that Citrix technology was going to be the right solution for their district.
“Citrix was the only supplier that was compatible with our hosted cloud platform,” Rebecca said. “It was a huge bonus for us that the solution was being hosted in Azure, which is where our servers were. Your platform really provided not only everything that we could think of that we wanted, but also, what we would need in the future.”
So the decision was made. Rebecca and her team moved forward with Citrix.
Choosing the Solutions to Implement First
But with everything that Citrix has to offer, the school district needed to choose the solutions that they would implement first. To avoid being completely overwhelmed with decisions, timelines, and training, Rebecca worked closely with a Customer Success Manager who guided her through the process. Together, they rolled out Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix Content Collaboration, both of which are making a highly positive difference in the ways in which the students and teachers work. And Rebecca is also deploying the Citrix Workspace App in this semester, an addition that excites her and her team.
With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service, they are publishing a full catalog of applications including Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Peachtree, and various educational applications.
And in the more advanced classes?
Rebecca has added virtual desktops for CAD, Visual Studio, and Adobe Primer.
To power these heavy workloads, the team is using NV6 servers in Azure for CAD and Visual Studio. For Adobe Premiere, they are running E16SV3 servers because they deliver accelerated networking. This configuration enables the school district’s team to deliver graphics-intensive applications better than ever before.
“One of our CAD teachers actually told us today’s performance in the virtual environment exceeds what was achieved in the local environment,” Rebecca said.
Encrypted Email is one of the Citrix Content Collaboration features that Rebecca is happiest about. She even went as far as to say that she “loves Encrypted Email!” As a school district in a semi-urban, economically challenged area, there is a great deal of sensitive information being shared. With all of the data privacy regulations in place, Rebecca needed a solution that would provide her district with the data safeguards needed to effectively communicate via email. Citrix technology made that possible.
The users in the school district also really love Citrix Content Collaboration.
“File management becomes a challenge because the schools use multiple devices,” Rebecca said. “Citrix Content Collaboration helps us spend less time searching for our files and more time actually working with our files.”
Removing Boundaries, Adapting to Change
Rebecca believes the greatest benefit from this project is removing boundaries in the district. Citrix solutions enable the district to adapt to the requests and the changes from schools with ease. For example, if a school in the district wants to add more instances of a popular class, they no longer have to wait until the next budget year to make that happen because the financial increases are not significant. Citrix technology has made it possible for the district to be significantly more agile, and everyone involved reaps the benefits.
As for the implementation of Citrix Workspace in the schools? Rebecca says that both the students and the teachers really embraced it. And because Citrix made it simple, the learning curve wasn’t steep.
At the close of our conversation, we asked Rebecca if she had any final thoughts about Citrix Workspace.
“We’re a small-to-midsize school district here in western Pennsylvania,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of money. So don’t think that you have to be in a large, metropolitan area. Don’t think that you need to have a big staff or a large budget in order to be able to accomplish this kind of digital transformation and be successful.”
Here at Citrix, we’re really excited to be on a team that delivers a technology solution that changes the world around us. It’s a joy to hear that Citrix Workspace is making a positive impact in our schools.
Read the customer story or check out the on-demand recording of my interview with Rebecca about her digital transformation with Citrix Workspace.
